Nick Clegg said his party was focused on the "painstaking work" of fixing the country's "very big and long term problems".

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has played down the threat of UKIP as British politics' third party, saying Nigel Farage stands no chance of gaining power.

Latest polling data suggested the Lib Dems would claim just 13 per cent of the vote at a General Election, behind Farage's party.

But Mr Clegg told Daybreak "there is two years to go" until the next election and added: "No one seriously thinks - even the greatest advocates of UKIP - that Nigel Farage is going to be the next Prime Minister."

UKIP will win the next elections for the European Parliament, UKIP economics spokesman Godfrey Bloom said today, after leader Nigel Farage confirmed that he will stand for parliament in the 2015 general election.

"It was, I reckoned, a no brainer that we were bound to come first in 2014 and that's clearly, I think, what's going to happen," he told the Sunday Politics.

He said the party's priority was now to get elected to the Westminster Parliament so they could challenge Mr Cameron directly.

"I'd love to see Nigel Farage get at his throat at Prime Minister's question time. That's our ambition," he said.